Websites that allow users to interact with one another have exploded in popularity in the last few years. Social networking web sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and microblogging websites such as Twitter enjoy widespread use. Millions of users post messages, images and videos on such websites on a daily, even hourly basis, oftentimes reporting events on a real-time or near-time basis, and revealing the user's activities and interests. Users typically direct messages to specific persons, their social group, or perhaps businesses maintaining a presence on social networking websites; however, oftentimes such messages are visible to the general public.
Such publicly accessible social media represents a potentially rich mine of information that can provide insight into user's lives and events across the country and across the world. Such information could be of great interest to various types of business organizations. For example, a network provider may wish to track all messages describing network problems across the country on a real-time basis. In another example, a national hotel chain may wish to track all messages relating to its hotel services, and in particular, messages reporting problems experienced by hotel guests. The sheer volume of such information, however, and the velocity of its flow, presents formidable difficulties for persons or organizations that wish to track and analyze such information.